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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

The Royal Charter Passenger List

I've been looking for the passenger list for the Royal Charter for almost a decade. I'm bad. I didn't want to hire someone to search for it in Australia (or Britain) for me. This was personal. This was the shipwreck that took my 3rd great grandfather Manus Maurice Boyle. I wanted to find it.

Time restrictions and other research always seemed to keep me from doing a proper search. One afternoon I just entered " 'Royal Charter' shipwreck" into a search on Google News Archive Search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch) and I got results!

I narrowed it down to articles close to the 1859 date and one of them had a list of the passengers! Maurice Boyle was listed under Steerage & 3rd Class just a few lines in. The article is from The Daily Southern Cross, Volume XVII, Issue 1284, 20 January 1860, Page 3.

If you click on the image it will take you to the news article (it's pretty long, but very interesting). You can save the article to as a .pdf or .png file by clicking on "view computer-generated text" above the article and then "entire article" in the green box to the right. You'll then see the entire page of the newspaper it was published in and there will be save options right above it.

I thought I'd share this, because while it took me awhile to find a list of the passengers, I discovered during my search that others were having the same difficulty as well. Perhaps we suffered from the same problem...all looking for a ship's manifest...a "typical" passenger list. Not realizing that perhaps a list could be found within other sources.

Thanks, Jenn...we've got some pretty interesting people in Rick's and my family trees! A murderer (who used to be a cop), someone who survived the worst fire in American history, and someone who allegedly was bootlegging alcohol during prohibition and also opened a whore house. I haven't found proof of that, but I do know that when he died in was in unconsecrated ground, so he certainly did something to tick the church off!